“Wasn’t it funny? She actually hoped you would understand and then, oh!” She threw out her hands in exaggerated surprise. “Right back under my control.”
“What do you want?” Gard asked.
She waved a hand easily. “Oh, what will you give me, Alagard, to have your little girl safe again? Your desert and your mortal body to wear?”
Tarn wanted to warn Gard, who had not been around last time to see what came of bargaining with the Shadow, but Gard spoke before he could. “If that was your best offer, you wouldn’t have started with it.”
She yawned. “Well, you’re cleverer than his last slut. All that slavish duty and infatuation made for a dull general. Even dutiful Killan grew bored in the end, though. Did you know he had a pretty boy warming his bed by the time he died?”
“Good,” Tarn said, feeling a little weight lift off his conscience at the idea. “He was worthy of love.”
She sneered a little and swung her gaze back to Gard. The shadows were pooling around her feet now, spreading down the dais, but her eyes were still hidden by their wet spillage. “My next offer? Come back to me, Alagard.”
There were people filing into the gallery over the doors—the audience Tarn had expected, here at last.
Gard laughed, throwing back his head. “And be your slave again?”
“Not this time,” she said, leaning forward, her voice coaxing. “Stand beside me willingly, and you will share my power. I will not lock you into that weak and mortal shape as the dragon does. Come back to me, and be your true self once again.”
“As my true self,” Gard said, lifting his chin, “I am my own lord. I will not ally myself with the things that skulk in the shadows and feed on the fears of good men.”
Her mouth tightened, the anger obvious even under the masking shadows. “Don’t forget that you were mine, you strutting little nature spirit. What I held, I can take back.”
“No,” Tarn said, and began to move toward her. “You cannot.” Arguing with the Shadow never changed anything, whatever shape it wore. He needed to find a way to strike without destroying what was left of Esen.
“I will raise every dead Selar who ever rode your sands,” she hissed. “All the spirit creatures that dwelled here before you rose—the kraken and the shark gods and the cold lords—will reawaken to tear apart the minds of your last followers, driving them to destruction. Your cities shall crumble into dust, and your oases fill with sand. By the time I am done, you will beg to join me.”
“The desert is beyond your reach,” Gard said quietly. “Only I may drive it to its own destruction.”
“Really?” she asked and giggled again. She lifted her hand, clenching it slowly into a closed fist.
Gard screamed, doubling over.
Tarn felt it shudder up their connection like lightning, Gard’s own strength suddenly twisting against him.
“I shattered you long before he tried to mend you,” the Shadow said. “Did you really think I wouldn’t keep the broken pieces you left behind?”
If Gard had been truly his, Tarn could have stopped it, but the bond between them was too crude and clumsy. Nonetheless, he stepped in front of Gard, bringing the little happy memory of the desert back into mind and letting it slide quietly over Gard.
Gard gasped, and went to his knees, but there was a note of relief in the sound as well.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tarn saw Aline moving, sliding from the shelter of one fall of masonry to another, approaching the dais from the side. To keep the Shadow’s eyes away from her, he said, “This is just petty torture. The greater part of him is under my protection. You cannot force him into your control again. Enough of this game, before I burn you into ash.”
“And burn your lover’s sweet daughter with me? I won’t leave this body until it is too damaged to survive.” Then she smiled again, curling her feet up underneath her comfortably. “And I don’t need power over him. I can reach every spell he’s ever cast.”
“And what good is that supposed to do you?” Gard demanded, breathless but defiant.
She held up her hand, and dark dust began to gather around her fingertips in tiny swirls like the dust devils Gard had thrown at Tarn when he had first flown into the desert. The swirls grew longer and darker, reaching out from her fingers like ribbons stretching into the night sky above them.
“What I can reach,” she said, her voice soft and clear in the cavernous hall, “I can undo.” Without turning her head, she added, “As you will prove, swordmaid. I am so sick of your kind, always tramping my borders, loud and uncouth and ugly, every one of you.”
Aline left cover and broke into a run toward the dais, bellowing a war cry and hoisting a twist of broken brazier in her sword hand. At the same moment, Cayl moved on Tarn’s other side, rolling into another line of shadows and dashing forward softly under the cover of Aline’s charge.
The Shadow curled a finger forward, sending one of her streams of darkness down to strike Aline as she roared forward between strips of light and shadow. For a moment, nothing seemed to have changed, but Tarn felt it, a sudden sickly drain on Aline’s link to him. He poured himself down the link, fighting back against the Shadow’s spell.
As Aline crossed the next line of moonlight, her hair gleamed, paler than before. On the next step, she stumbled, coughing suddenly.
“The trouble with love,” the Shadow remarked, as Aline staggered, “is how much of it you need to give away. Look at everyone you’ve ever given life to, Alagard—all those sick children and wounded beasts and lost travelers. All their lives would have come to nothing without your love. All their long, long lives.”
Aline pushed herself up, her elbow bowing, and the moonlight struck her face. There were lines around her eyes and mouth that had not been there an hour ago, her cheeks losing their bloom. As Tarn watched, she grew old before his eyes.
“Over nine hundred years they’ve been skulking in the desert,” the Shadow said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “It’s just not natural. Mortal things shouldn’t live so long, Alagard. It’s disgusting.” She lifted her hand again, reaching up and out.
One by one, the threads that bound Tarn to his hoard began to go cold. The links to all the women who had fought for him in another age suddenly crumbled and vanished from the world, each death a crippling blow: Acantha, Evadne, Klio.
Myrtilis.
It blinded him, blotting out the moonlight and ripping the breath from his lungs. Dimly, through the agony, he heard the Shadow say, voice sweet and confiding, “And this, Alagard, is how you free yourself from a dragon’s tyranny. There is only one way to truly wound them.”
Gard’s arm was round his waist, holding him up, his voice shrill as he shouted, “What are you doing to him?”
“I’m killing his hoard,” the Shadow said, throwing her head back to laugh and laugh.
Tarn felt the shift in the air even through the searing loss, even before Gard stood up, the winds gathering in the folds of his robes.
“You stole my daughter’s body,” Gard said, his voice shaking a little. “You’re torturing my lover and killing my friends. I’m not a dragon, Shadow, and I’m not a compassionate god. My Esen is brave enough to die to stop you.”
And the winds lifted over them, spearing straight at the Shadow on her throne.
There was movement behind them from the watchers in the balcony, and Tarn only understood that they were no mere watchers when he heard the bows sing. He flung himself forward to knock Gard down, sending a sheet of flame back to consume every arrow and archer. He saw Cayl lunge for where Aline was still struggling forward, before Tarn’s fires met Gard’s wind, and the whole hall erupted into light, wind, fire, and dust twisting together in a shining, directionless explosion.
Some of the arrows still got through, and he felt them thud into his back as Gard squirmed furiously beneath him. They could only scratch him, though, and when their bruising onslaught stopped, he rolled back to his feet and tugged them from his flesh with slow disdain.<
br />
The Shadow wasn’t looking at him. Instead, it stared past him, its face slack with honest surprise.
Tarn reached past the fading echoes of the oldest members of his hoard, testing the newest threads, drawn by the sense that something was horribly wrong. They were all still there: Dit, Ia, Barrett, and the rest, all save Cayl.
There was still something there, cold and wrong and solid as stone, but it was not living. Cayl was gone.
Tarn turned slowly, his stomach rising and his head spinning.
Not far from him, Cayl still stood over Aline, his shoulders braced and his head up. There were broken arrows scattered around his feet, and he did not move, not even to breathe. As embers sank down through the air, Tarn saw why.
Cayl had turned to stone.
“Esen didn’t know he could do that,” the Shadow mused, shaking her head. “Though there were all sorts of rumors about how exactly that nixie had cursed him. How fruitlessly noble, to sacrifice himself for a dying woman.” She stood up. “Of course, those arrows would have brought her a swifter death had they struck.”
Death after death shuddered through Tarn, and as he tried to step forward, his body shook and weakened.
“They were poisoned, of course,” the Shadow mentioned, walking down the steps toward him, bringing the threads of dust and darkness with her in a thin mist. “I can’t kill you, but a bare touch of any one of those would fell a mortal man. They should incapacitate even you for a while. Perhaps you would be good enough to just go back to sleep.”
Tarn lunged forward at her, but his knee gave out, throwing him awkwardly onto the floor. Gard caught him, his hands warm and steady, and snapped, “I’m not crippled yet.”
“No,” she said, strolling closer, “but you are caught in that human form, aren’t you? And bound for years, once the poison cripples him and sends him back to sleep.”
Gard’s pale eyes widened, and his hands tightened on Tarn’s forearms. He wet his lips, looking between Tarn and the Shadow, and then leaned forward to demand urgently, “Release me.”
And again, the Shadow laughed.
“Please,” Gard begged. He looked like he would have said more, but the Shadow’s laughter drowned him out.
The room was spinning around Tarn, and he couldn’t fight off another blow. Quietly, he released the hold he had over Gard.
The connection between them crumbled like sand, the ugly weight of it lifting from Tarn’s soul even as his heart broke. For a moment, Gard stood, utterly still, his eyes shocked.
Then his human form vanished, and for a moment Tarn held a whirl of sand in his arms.
“Free!” Gard sang out, and the wind roared up and out, lifting every torn banner in the hall as Alagard, desert storm once more, streaked out through the broken roof, screaming out his triumph and relief.
And the Shadow laughed and laughed.
“And to think you once rode against me with half the world at your back,” she gloated. “Look at you now, old king. Your hoard are dying, your reluctant lover has fled, your new sword arm has turned to stone.” She yawned delicately. “At least I know where to go next. I think the survivors need to hear how you’ve failed. Poor little Esen can run straight back to the Court of Shells and tell the survivors that the Shadow was just too strong for you.” She tapped her finger on her chin, pouting a little. “And then I’ll kill them, of course, but should it be one by one or all at once?”
“I won’t let you,” Tarn managed, the words catching in his throat as he sank back on his heels. The air was full of ash and embers, multiplying before his eyes as his vision blurred.
“You can’t stop me,” she said. “There’s no one left to help you. You’ve lost them all.”
But from the back of the hall, his voice trembling, Zeki said, “He’s still got me.”
“Easily mended,” the Shadow said, raising her hand.
But a quiet little thread settled against Tarn’s heart, young and scared and held together by nothing more than raw courage. It was such a small thing, but he could think again and reach out to touch his power, and so he called up the flames in a ring around himself and the Shadow, cutting her off from the rest of the room and boiling her miasma from the air.
They had been here before, although the Shadow had worn a different face then, and that time it had ended with the whole world torn asunder.
“You and I,” he said to her, weary to the bone. “No more games.”
The air crackled around them, and the Shadow’s face went cold and still. There was nothing playful left in her voice as she said, “To dissolution, no matter the cost?”
Tarn pushed himself slowly to his feet, forcing his knees to lock in place and hold him up. “This is where your hoard dwell. It is your choice.”
“They are distractions, nothing more,” the Shadow said, sounding bored. “They will keep breeding and keep filling up the empty places of the world, however many we kill today.”
A second thread curled around Tarn’s heart, next to Zeki’s—Aline, no longer fading toward death, but gathering strength.
“Why do we do this?” Tarn asked the Shadow, as he had not had a chance to ask last time. “Why must you destroy all you touch?”
She hissed at him, twisting Esen’s face until it no longer looked human. “Because I was here first! And you came, you and your kind, into this quiet place and you polluted it with fire and light and life, and there was no more quiet to be found. And I could lay it bare and wipe every foul growth from the earth, and it would still be ruined.”
Stubborn, foul-tempered defiance suddenly ran up Ia’s thread, urging him on, and he breathed a little more freely, hoping the Shadow would not notice. And here was Dit, throwing life up the link at him like a burst of fast music, and a new thread, silken, languid, and vicious—Sethan, whom he had never expected to be part of any hoard.
“Poor Shadow,” he said, and it was not all mockery. It had worn a pink-mouthed lisping boy in Eyr, and he wondered if it always took children, who had little knowledge of the true sweetness and sorrow of love or how it felt to create life and companionship and beauty out of simple things.
And, more precious than he had realized, Myrtilis reached out to him, her thread as fine and fragile as spider silk, thin and fraying and worn.
“Tarn,” she whispered straight into his heart. “Trust.”
He didn’t know what to make of that, but the new strength they were all bringing him surged through him, making his fires burn hot. His human body was too weakened to channel all the strength he wished to unleash upon the Shadow, so he let it go, rising into a towering pillar of flame.
The Shadow stared up at him, her eyes narrowed in calculation, but he did not become the dragon. Instead, he stayed between the two shapes, burning as a beacon and a warning to all those who thought they had looked on the Shadow and seen true power. He was taller than the hall like this, swelling up into the sky above the palace until his light shone down on every rooftop. The air was cool, stirring around him with the promise of a storm to come. In the east, dawn was limning the far-distant mountains, but in the west the mountains between him and the desert were mere dim, storm-blurred shadows against the clearer darkness of the night sky.
The Shadow’s lips parted with surprise. “I thought we never battled in these forms. We could actually rip each other apart.”
“Yes,” Tarn said, and his voice shuddered across the sky. “But now, when it is just you and I, and the whole world waiting, let it be so.”
And finally, finally, the Shadow rose out of Esen’s body, piling up in a spreading, smearing cloud that veiled the stars.
Tarn struck, hard and sharp, and they met with a crack like thunder, light splintering across the sky. Tarn formed a great spear of fire and reached into the mass of Shadow to rip it apart, but it wrapped around him, smothering out the air that kept him burning, and he had to use his weapon to tear himself free. They recoiled, turning around each other in the sky. Tarn struck fast and har
d, trying to catch it unaware even as it crept around and behind him, trying to suffocate away stray flames.
And all the while, the wind was rising, pulling Tarn’s flames out of his control. It hit the Shadow too, thinning it into tatters that could be burned away.
There was screaming below them, running panic in the streets, roofs burning where he had bled flame, but he couldn’t afford to spare any attention. The Shadow was battering him, stealing his strength, and he was forced to grapple with a thing that faded under his glare and reformed behind him to attack from another angle.
The fight swung him round again, so he faced west toward Alagard and the desert. And he saw the storm coming, the very same mass of wind and sand that Gard had left tethered on the far side of the mountains, bearing straight down on them like a spear loosed from a god’s hand.
The distraction cost him, as the Shadow surged up and forward, curving over him like a wave. Tarn ducked and dodged, hurling himself through its heart in one great flare.
And the storm struck, screaming rage and triumph, even as Gard’s voice sounded, fierce as the sun. “Tarn! Down!”
Chapter 31: Holding
HE FELL back into his human form as fast as he could, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. The edge of the storm caught the last of his flames, shredding them into nothingness before he could pull them into a safer form.
It hurt and left him gasping on the floor, but it meant nothing compared to what was happening in the sky above him. Gard’s storm tore into the Shadow, ripping it apart like a lion on its prey, sand and wind scouring through it. The sky went dark again, but this was the darkness of a sandstorm, all its power focused on one spot in the air above the city.
Tarn didn’t notice the sand falling through the air, soft as rain, until Esen turned over and coughed. He looked away from the storm then, though he couldn’t stop listening to the Shadow wail and beg, and saw Esen push herself up to spit sand out of her mouth, her lashes flickering. Then she sank down again, her cheek resting against a low billow of dust, and he realized the tiled floor was covered with a soft layer of grit, and more was coming down.
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